Dear friends, As we continue to transition, 2018 has been an exciting year for CHSA. In March, we marked CHSA’s 55th year at our Chinatown: Past, Present and Future Gala where we inaugurated the Sarah and Phil Choy Community Service Award and posthumously honored both Mayor Edwin M. Lee and Rose Pak. In April, we launched production of the Ed Lee: The People’s Mayor documentary. The film is scheduled to be completed in December and premier February 2019. On December 1st our new exhibit, Towards Equality: California’s Chinese American Women will open in our Learning Center. To help us close […]

Update about Ed Lee: The People’s Mayor by Barbara Koh: We set a goal, and you surpassed it! We are deeply grateful for—and elated over—your donations to The People’s Mayor: Ed Lee, a film-in-progress co-produced by the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA) and Bay Area Emmy winner Rick Quan. When we launched the endeavor in June, we hoped for $50,000 to make a documentary about Ed Lee, son of working-class immigrants, San Francisco Chinatown lawyer, champion of civil rights and equal opportunity and the first Chinese American mayor of a major US city. We hit that mark within a […]

Dear friends, It has been my honor and privilege to serve as CHSA interim Executive Director for the past year. I would like to thank the CHSA Board of Directors and staff, and you, our community friends and members, who have stood by the organization during this time of transition. We faced organizational challenges as well as personal ones, especially with the loss of our Grand Historian Phil Choy in March 2017 and Mayor Ed Lee last December. Despite these challenges, I am proud of the many things we have accomplished together: streamlining the organization and making it sustainable; launching […]

Immigrant Families Torn Apart, Then And Now By Connie Young Yu Mrs. Lee Yoke Suey, widow of an American-born citizen, returning to San Francisco from China with her family in January 1924, was barred from entry, separated from her children and imprisoned on Angel Island. She had several strikes against her: she was born in China, therefore “an alien ineligible for citizenship” and even though she had re-entry papers, she was a widow and therefore “without status.” The Angel Island Immigration Station Board of Inquiry ordered Mrs. Lee’s deportation after she tested positive for liver fluke, a non-contagious and treatable […]

Dear Friends, Under the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy, families fleeing violence in Central America and elsewhere have been captured near the border, the children torn from their parents and held in separate tents and cages. A public outcry forced the Administration to back down from its family separation policy, and a federal court ordered it to reunite the families split. But the president’s anti-immigration agenda still includes a rush to open family jails and continues to create terror, chaos and uncertainty for immigrant households and communities in the US. Last month, the Supreme Court upheld the president’s ban on travel […]

Dear Friends, I am humbled and honored to have been asked to be the interim Executive Director. I am passionate about the mission of the Chinese Historical Society of America and the great work it has performed over the past fifty years. Recent and deeply troubling events in Charlottesville, Virginia and elsewhere throughout the country arising from racial hatred perpetrated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis demonstrate that to understand (or misunderstand) history is to lay a foundation for the present and the future. The Chinese American experience matters because it illuminates not only times of racial intolerance, but it also […]

In Loving Memory of Philip P. Choy December 17, 1926 – March 16, 2017 It is with profound sadness that CHSA acknowledges the passing of architect and historian Philip P. Choy on March 16, 2017. Phil tirelessly devoted himself to research, preservation and education of Chinese American history. Together with the late Him Mark Lai, Phil taught the first Chinese American history course at San Francisco State University. Course material he co-authored, The History of The Chinese in California, A Syllabus, is a well-respected publication that is repeatedly referenced today. In the early 1970s, Phil hosted the groundbreaking PBS series […]

Thank you for your support! As we close this momentous year, please accept our deepest appreciation for your support in bringing to light the untold stories, sacrifices, and triumphs of generations of Chinese in America. With your participation, CHSA opened the new exhibition Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion (CAEI), a gift from the New York Historical Society. After four months of preparations, CAEI opened to hundreds of visitors and rave reviews for the Museum’s 15th Anniversary on November 5, 2016. In addition to the exhibition, we debuted our new Museum Gift Store in the Philip Choy Gallery, and have hired a new team […]